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Remember last week, when I told you not to panic?
Well, we have another prize pack to give away, consisting of a set of the new US editions of Douglas Adams’ original five-book Hitchhiker trilogy; a signed copy of Eoin Colfer’s new Hitchhiker book, And Another Thing...; a copy of Colfer’s Artemis Fowl; and your very own DON’T PANIC tea-towel. (The words on the towel are much larger and friendlier than that...rather like a flirtatious Algolian Suntiger.)
I like books, I like playing with knives and glue, and I need a place to keep my jewelry. If you’re like me, you're in luck; this is a step-by-step tutorial on making a book-lover’s jewelry box from a few simple materials.
You’ll need
A jewelry box with drawers you can remove and otherwise mutilate; it can be hard to find drawers shallow enough to fit in a book, but they’re out there. I kept my eyes peeled for a few weeks and found the pink monstrosity at a Salvation Army.
A cool-looking book that’s big enough to fit your jewelry box elements. I fell in love with these How Things Work books when I saw them in a Goodwill. They're silver, with machines engraved on the front and the most beautiful endpapers ever:
Do you know where your towel is? Right now? This instant?
Do you want to?
Thanks to the wonderful Colleen Lindsay, we have a prize pack to give away, consisting of a set of the new US editions of Douglas Adams’ original five-book Hitchhiker trilogy; a signed copy of Eoin Colfer’s new Hitchhiker book, And Another Thing; a copy of Colfer’s Artemis Fowl; and your very own DON’T PANIC tea-towel. (The words on the towel are much larger and friendlier that that; see below.)
The Rules: All you have to do to win this embarrassment of riches is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post before noon EST, Tuesday, November 10th. A winner be be selected at random. Please check your email on Tuesday! You have 24 hours to respond before I select a new winner. And if you’re not the winner this time, well...
What’s a big new book without an audio version?
Hard to read in the car, that’s what.
Thank goodness for Kate Reading and Michael Kramer, the dynamic duo behind all of the Wheel of Time audiobooks; Michael also did Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy (sadly without Kate). Here’s an interview with them about the series, including their favorite characters and biggest challenges (often one and the same). It’s so funny to hear the voices I know from the audiobooks, especially Michael’s epic rumble, speaking casually! [Edited to add: Interview by Laura Wilson.] Enjoy:
The audiobook is available in CD format and also download-ably from iTunes and Audible.
Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, and she can’t hear you—she has her headphones on and is listenin’ to Elliott rock, rock, rock, rock, rock me to sleep.
Throughout the month, we’ve found steampunk inspiring and thought-provoking, sexy and silly, but on Halloween in New York City, steampunk is going to be scary. Zach Morris and Third Rail Projects are presenting a steampunk haunted house at the Abrons Arts Center’s Playhouse on the Lower East Side, and I could barely watch the trailer. Granted, I am a well-known and well-mocked scaredy-cat, but just listen to this disclaimer:
The Steampunk Haunted House is a frightening, immersive experience that winds through the theater and catacombs of the Henry Street Settlement playhouse. It requires walking up and down staircases, and navigating tight spaces and twists and turns in the dark. There will be fog effects, strobe lights, loud noises, lots of dust, soot, dripping pipes, churning gears, rusty metal, and other things that will hurt you if you touch them. Visitors who have health conditions are strongly cautioned should check with their doctor before attending the event.
It’s a brilliant idea; steampunk seems uniquely suited to the haunted-house experience. The most effective horror capitalizes on the human anxiety over boundaries between natural/self and unnatural/other, and if any aesthetic offers a handy way to blur the lines between the living and the dead, the human and the machine, and especially the beautiful and the grotesque, it’s steampunk.
If this sounds like a good time, RSVP on the event page and let us know afterwards what you thought!
Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, and she is not going within ten—okay, five—okay, two miles of the Steampunk Haunted House. Durn New York office.
Last night, on the eve of The Gathering Storm’s release, Wheel of Time fans gathered in Charleston at Brigham Young University for a release party with Brandon Sanderson. Reporting from the ground was Spencer Powell, and below the cut is some of the magic and madness he witnessed there. (If, like us, you couldn't make the Charleston JUST KIDDING BYU shindig, see if you can catch Brandon at another one of his tour stops, including one in Charleston for reals.)
I’m not a car person, possibly because I can’t drive the beastly things, and I’ve never been able to get excited over the fine distinction between the beautiful curve of this fender or the elegance of the other...I dunno...other car part.
That’s why I love concept cars. They’re blatant, out there, and often science-fictional. Remember the one that could change shape?! That was, like, a mutant car. I understand mutants.
This new concept car from Toyota, the FT-EVII, has a sleek and steampunky interior: “The traditional wheel and pedal controls have been replaced by a gilded mechanical joystick contraption that would look appropriate on a Victorian-era rocket ship.” This video from the Tokyo Motor Show has some clips with the FT-EVII, as well as the joystick-controlled “single-person transporter,” the iReal. A glimpse inside the cab of the H.M.S Stubbington, perhaps?
(via Engadget)
Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, a job which thankfully does not require her to drive.
The addictive blog CakeWrecks, which usually showcases horrifying mishaps, also does awesome cakes on Sundays, and last Sunday was steampunk cakes day! How deliciously timely.
One of the reasons I love steampunk is that you can’t go down to Steampunks-“Я”-Us for all your retrofuturistic needs, so the whole ethos is one of creativity and can-do. The cakes on CakeWrecks were all made by professionals, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t try this at home (perhaps using those poisonous and wonderful silver sprinkles that look like little ball-bearings?).
This is my favorite from the CakeWrecks Round-Up, made by Mike’s Amazing Cakes, from exoskeletoncabaret's Flickr stream.
Irene has covered Leviathan’s beautiful illustrations with author Scott Westerfeld, and Joe Monti sat down with artist Keith Thompson, but I'm here, as usual, to talk words.
When Leviathan opens, the world is split. England runs on the ingenuity of its scientists; the Darwinists manipulate animals’ and plants’ “life threads” to make powerful beasts of burden or lighter-than-air whale-zeppelins. Across the Channel, most of Europe has gone Clanker instead, using walking-machines and other gears-and-bolts technology and considering the Darwinists’ experiments with life unnatural and blasphemous to boot. It’s 1914, and the world is about to split a little wider.
SyFy was nice enough to send us a screener for the new series, Stargate Universe, which premiers tonight. I had never watched Stargate before, but I confess I was sucked in by the shiny press pack. Seriously, it lights up. That’s cool. And Robert Carlyle is in the show; I’ve loved him since I saw The Full Monty as a young un, which is, I know, a little weird. Believe me, this story gets weirder.
Say you have an established franchise, together with the opportunity to revise or reboot it in a new series. Say you get a great actor to head the cast. Say you have the idea to throw a random assortment of military and civilian personnel onto a ship deep in unknown space and use that set-up, together with the franchise mythology, to see what happens.
Let’s give a hearty Tor.com welcome* to author Keith McGowan, who’s going to spend the next month blogging about kids’ books, as well as interviewing people in Science and Technology Studies, writing about his adopted home of Vienna, and hosting a book giveaway.
Keith’s first children’s book is The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children, a modern-day Hansel and Gretel story. I enjoyed the way the book plays with expectations; unusually for a middle grade book, it uses multiple viewpoints and formats, including the witch’s personal diary. One of our heroes, Sol, is a boy with long hair and, like my own little brother before he grew that goatee, he occasionally gets mistaken for a girl. His sister Connie is the crop-haired rascal, and the two of them navigate a suburban jungle full of dangers and potential allies. And I do mean dangers—it’s not for the faint of heart, but I think a lot of kids delight in “scary” details like the witch’s suggestions for wine and desserts that go well with baked nine-year-old.
The book just came out from Holt and has already been picked for the Indie Next List, which also includes books by Neil Gaiman, Richard Peck, Patricia Reilly Giff, Andrew Clements, Jane Smiley and Sid Fleischman. There are illustrations throughout by Yoko Tanaka, who just did Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant; they remind me just a little of Dave McKean.
Keith tells us he’s been a science fiction and fantasy reader all his life and lists Stanislaw Lem, Philip Dick, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury among his favorite writers.
Look for his posts, two or three a week, starting tomorrow. They’ll be tagged “Letters from Abroad” and feature a photo of a giant green witch, painted in downtown Vienna—but more on that from Keith.
*I am now taking suggestions for what, exactly, constitutes a Tor.com welcome. It sounds...hazardous
Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, a job which involves testing out recipes for baked nine-year-old. She is learning to play the fiddle.
Via Paul Tremblay and the Publisher’s Lunch newsletter:
Sarah Gray’s WUTHERING BITES, a retelling of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff is a vampire, to John Scognamiglio at Kensington, in a very nice deal, for publication in September 2010, by Evan Marshall at Evan Marshall Agency (World).
So it’s a trend now. Of course, the key to a successful supernatural update is that you should probably start with something out of copyright, because those authors are mostly dead and can’t come to your house in the middle of the night and beat you up. (Or can they…?)
But when I sent this around the office for a chuckle, we had some fun kicking around re-vamps (get it?!) of more recent books and then opened it up to Twitter (#PPZripoffs).
Ami: Me Talk Pixie One Day
Megan/Ryan: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genies, or, The Year of Magical Drinking
Ryan: A Beanstalk Grows in Brooklyn
Joshlandon: Of Mice and Watchmen
Mitzpa: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Sue_Moe: Tuesdays With Mordred
And the title for the image was from maretorliss.
JOIN US. Maybe here we can add descriptions, too? “A Farewell to Arms and Legs, by TaraLazar, pits WWI ambulance driver Frederic Henry against Catherine, the zombie who invaded his heart. And then ate it.”
Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, where her English has come in handy exactly five times.
There’s not a lot I can say about Catching Fire without massively spoiling the first book, The Hunger Games. I will say that this planned trilogy is turning out a bit like the original Star Wars movies: the first one was exciting and innovative, while the second one is darker, more complex, and paves the way for a third installment. I’m a Return of the Jedi fan, myself, so hopefully this trilogy will also conclude with a dance party.
If you’ve read The Hunger Games, click though! I won’t spoil Catching Fire in the post itself, cross my heart, but watch out for the comments.
[I hereby certify that by clicking this link, I will not scream about Hunger Games spoilers.]
SciFiGuy and SciFiChick are offering copies of Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, the follow-up to The Hunger Games—but hurry! Today is the last day of both giveaways.
Tonight (9/15) at 7:00pm EST, Acacia and Other Lands author David Anthony Durham will be chatting live on Suvudu. Their last live chat with China Mieville was a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to this one. (via Colleen Lindsay)
These rare photos from the Star Wars set are hilarious! Look how he’s bugging her, they’re clearly siblings....either that or he’s a nine-year-old with a crush....uh oh.
Things even Neil Gaiman didn’t know about Neil Gaiman, like, he totally “once wrote a Nebula-winning story using only the middle row of his keyboard.”
Back in June, Tor UK and SciFiNow’s War of the Words competition asked writers around the world to send in their fantasy and science fiction manuscripts for a chance at publication. They planned to announce a short list of six, but—oops and hooray—the entries were so good that they are requesting ten full manuscripts for the next round. The short list, in no particular order:
1. The Sun Song, by Andrew Tisbert
2. The Nemesis List, by RJ Frith
3. Mech, by Jim Keen
4. Children Of Yaltza, by Kerrie Maxwell
5. Pale Queen’s Courtyard, by Marcin Wrona
6. Evacuee, by Paula Hadlum
7. Thorn, by Steff Green
8. The Darkness Kept, by Lamar Giles
9. The Barocles Codicil, by Susan Sarapuk
10. Creations, by William Mitchell
Tor UK will announce a winner no later than November 25th (or 25 November, if you like). Congratulations, and good luck, to all the writers!
Megan Messinger is a production assistant for Tor.com, a job which involves reading about books on the internet. She is learning to play the fiddle.
Diana Peterfreund’s first fantasy novel Rampant came out last week; she’s also written several college-set novels for the chick lit crowd, but I’ll take my YA with a heavy dose of unicorns, please! And Peterfreund’s unicorns in Rampant are delightfully nasty. They have fangs and poison horns, love to snack on human flesh, and range from goat-sized to horse-sized to—gulp—elephant-sized. But what’s a supernatural nasty without its supernatural nasty-killer?
Cue the virgins.
Astrid Llewellyn has never quite understood her mother’s obsession with unicorns; even she admits they’re extinct. But when the unicorns start to reemerge, Astrid is packed off to the newly-reestablished unicorn-killing school in Rome. In between unicorn attacks, the girls there have plenty to worry about, like who’s got the best score in archery, why a shadowy corporation is funding the school, and, oh, those cute Italian boys….
Go check out this great interview with Tor.com and Tor Books’ Patrick Nielsen Hayden on ebooks, Star Trek fanfic, and the future of publishing. You can also ogle a close-up of Jon Foster’s gorgeous Boneshaker art!
Last Thursday afternoon, I saw this link: Staging a Naval Battle at the Queens World’s Fair Site. Fine artist Duke Riley was building reed-and-recyclables boats and planned to make them fight in the old reflecting pool, filled just for the occasion, like the flooded Colosseum of old. The event was free and open to the public, but there was a dress code: toga. I had to go, so I borrowed the Tor.camera and called my brother and my partner-in-mischief Nina: “Cancel your plans. We’ve got a mock Roman-style mock navel battle to attend.”
According to Ancient Rome on Five Denarii A Day, no proper Roman lady wears a toga; not wishing to be mistaken for prostitutes, and rather smug in our knowledge, Nina and I donned two layers of slips to stand for the tunic-like stola and draped pashminas over our heads and shoulders. We wrapped my brother in the palest sheet we had—baby blue—and trekked forth to Queens. As we got closer to the museum in Corona Park, we started spotting our fellow Romans: babies with laurel-crowns, young boys wrapped in their Spider-Man or Batman sheets, hipsters in big bath towels. (That’s a different occasion, guys.) The museum was serious about the dress code: there were boxes of fabric out for those who didn’t arrive properly attired, and the biggest threat of all was, no toga, no free beer.
Oh, yes. The article didn’t mention that part. Free as in beer, beer as in rhymes with “oh, dear.”
A mermaid has been spotted in Kirit Yam, Israel! NB: The photo to the right is not of the Kirit Yam mermaid, or I would have a million dollars.
Some non-fiction books for science fiction writers recommended by the panel at Worldcon (made up of Niall Harrison, Vince Docherty, James Cambias, Geoff Ryman, and Kari Sperring).
Mary Robinette Kowal on gay characters in fantasy movies. “What gay characters in fantasy movies?!” I hear you cry. Exactly.
Artist Peter Root makes amazing cityscapes out of soap, staples, and scrap metal. (via Big Dumb Object)
A retro-futuristic prank. (Thanks, Navah!)
Following up on the recent controversy over Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, a book with a non-white protagonist that was going to have a white girl on the cover, London University’s Laura Atkins discusses white privilege and children’s publishing. (via Bibliophile Stalker)
Attention museum owners and those too rich for their own good: T Rex for sale! The fossil is 57% complete and is known as Samson.
[Image by flickr user Temari 09, used under a Creative Commons license.]
